VIDEO: Insilico Medicine, a bioinformatics company engaged in developing new methods for pathway activation analysis and deep learning for drug repurposing and drug discovery will partner with Youth Laboratories, Ltd. to...
view more

Credit: Beauty.AI

Insilico Medicine has developed a conservative business model providing a broad range of bioinformatics services to pharmaceutical, cosmetics, supplement and nutrition companies and academic institutions. However, the primary focus of the company is practical applications of aging research to drug discovery. It developed a high-throughput platform for predicting the efficacy of thousands of drugs and therapeutic interventions in multiple diseases and age-related pathologies. Its GeroScope system is used to evaluate the ability of multiple drugs to revert the pathological signaling pathway activation profiles in old tissues to youthful states. The company believes that some these predictions will result in potent human geroprotectors, compounds that slow down or even reverse age-associated damage on the tissue-specific and organismal levels.

"There is abundant data available from punch biopsies of human skin of various ages and after exposure to ultraviolet light and various pathogens. We spent almost two years working with this data and searching for molecules and combinations that can minimize the difference between young and old signaling states with the least expected side effects. We will require an accurate metric to track both efficacy and possible side effects. Our research collaborators in large cosmetics companies may also benefit from such a tool. We are happy to partner with Youth Laboratories, which is developing visual biomarkers of human aging to be able to test our hypotheses", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine and a consultant to Youth Laboratories.

While most people consider aging to be irreversible natural process and do not try to explore possible interventions to increase longevity, they care about how they look and are perceived by the others. Youth Laboratories developed a platform for testing various algorithms that rate human faces using many parameters. This platform available through Beauty.AI website allows users to submit their pictures linked to their age and biometric parameter using a standardized Android or iOS app and have it analyzed by multiple robots developed by teams from all over the world. The team is also developing RYNKL, a mobile app to track the appearance and progression of wrinkles and other age-related changes. A recent crowdfunding campaign the the RYNKL app launched on a crowdfunding website Kickstarter on December 14th.

"Insilico Medicine is one of the leaders in applying deep learning and other machine learning algorithms to biological data and we are happy to test some of their algorithms on our Beauty.AI platform. Our company, Youth Laboratories is also developing a broad range of algorithms to measure facial changes and evaluate the effects of lifestyle, diet, supplements and skin care products. But we are also very interested in how future Artificial Intelligence will judge and perceive humans and Beauty.AI is one of the first attempts to help AI understand how to evaluate people", said Alex Shevtsov, CEO of Youth Laboratories.

###

About Insilico Medicine, Inc

Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a bioinformatics company located at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore. It utilizes advances in genomics, big data analysis and deep learning for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company pursues internal drug discovery programs in cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, sarcopenia and geroprotector discovery and provides services to pharmaceutical companies. Brief company video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.